Shims or wedges, tapered work-pieces, and the like, are well known and widely used in the construction of homes, buildings, furniture and the like, to raise, align, square up and fill gaps of windows, doors and other building components. Traditionally, shims have been formed out of wood and often simply crafted out of scrap pieces of wood. To provide a ready supply of shims, wooden shims have been manufactured by the bundle.
Other attempts at providing a ready supply of shims include the manufacture of synthetic shims. Such shims however tend to be formed primarily from plastic, which tend to be more pliable and, thus, more difficult to break or snap off at a desired length.
In an effort to improve the mechanical properties of other synthetic household and industrial products, building materials and the like, these products have been manufactured using polymers or plastics reinforced with a variety of fillers. By compounding in mineral fillers such as calcium carbonate, talc, mica and wollastonite and synthetic fillers such as glass, graphite, carbon and Kevlar fibers, as well as natural fibers, such as cellulose fiber, some mechanical properties of polymers or plastics are vastly improved. The cellulose fiber used to reinforce polymers or plastics has typically included wood flour or ground wood fiber having an effective mesh size of about 10 to 60 mesh. Use of such cellulose fiber fillers tends to have many drawbacks as a result.
For instance, because of low bulk density and the need for pre-drying before or during compounding, processing with wood flour or ground wood fiber tends to results in low production rates and high costs. The powdery consistency of such fillers not only results in a messy operation, but tends to pose potential health risks to those manning the processing. Wood flour and ground wood fiber also tend to cause blocking or agglomeration due to the material packing together and tend to be extremely difficult to convey and feed into an extruder, the inlet of which is typically small relative to the low bulk density of these materials.
Further, the use of ground wood fiber or wood flour as the raw material for forming cellulose fiber-polymer pellets or directly forming cellulose fiber enhanced polymer materials or products, tends to be quite costly. Other sources of more cost-effective cellulose fiber based raw materials have tended to be over looked due to the industry's focus on ground wood fiber or wood flour as the preferred raw material. For example, materials found in the waste streams of most paper mills could provide an abundant supply of processed cellulose fiber. Today, paper mills discard millions of tons per year of processed cellulose fiber along with other materials such as plastics and/or inorganics that are not suitable for use in the paper making process. To date, this source of substantially wet waste cellulose material has not been tapped as a manufacturing fiber source and, particularly, as a fiber source for the manufacture of non-wood shims.
Thus, it is desirable to provide an improved non-wood shim and, particularly, a non-wood shim comprising natural fibers, and a process by which such non-wood shims can be manufactured using a wet waste processed cellulose fiber based source material.